Color Craft Installs Heidelberg 6-Color Speedmaster CD 74

Monday, January 05, 2004

Press release from the issuing company

KENNESAW, Ga. – January 5, 2004 – Color Craft Printing, a mid-sized commercial printer with a specialty in process color and booklet making, is now integrated for a seamless workflow and poised for new business growth with the recent installation of Heidelberg’s Speedmaster CD 74 6-color sheetfed press, its Prinect PrintReady prepress system and Prosetter platesetter.
President Bob Thompson said the new press and prepress equipment makes Color Craft the first fully automated print shop in Charleston, W.V. He expects the new equipment to help increase annual revenue by nearly 13 percent to $2.25 million in 2004. The new 6-color press can print up to six 8 ½ x 11 inch sheets at one time and is able to print on heavier stocks. This will allow Color Craft to take on jobs in the packaging market that it hadn’t been able to do previously.
“The timeframe for turning around jobs has gotten so tight that you have to have the right tools in place if you want to be ahead of the curve,” Thompson said. “We thought that if this equipment was in our competitors’ hands we’d be in trouble. So now with a fully automated system that gives us the ability to go computer-to-plate and do proofing, we are in a position to grow our business and stay ahead of our competition.”
The Speedmaster CD 74, winner of the International Forum’s seal for outstanding design quality, is developed specifically for industrial-oriented commercial and packaging printers. Automated makeready and easy-to-control sheet travel make the Speedmaster CD 74 an extremely user-friendly press - on a broad range of substrates from flimsy papers to stiff board and plastic sheet. At Color Craft, the CD 74 replaced two older presses and as a result, Thompson said capacity has doubled because of the efficiencies gained from the new press. Productivity, he said, increased 25% only one month after installation.
The Prinect PrintReady prepress system is the first prepress workflow worldwide entirely based on the JDF standard. With this system, Color Craft will be able to simplify and accelerate all of it prepress tasks, plan jobs more efficiently from start to finish and monitor the whole process centrally. PrintReady maximizes a printer’s level of automation, integration and local processing and provides the basis for establishing a new prepress standard.
Color Craft is also positioned to embrace computer-to-plate efficiencies with the purchase of Heidelberg’s Prosetter 74. With violet technology, the Prosetter enables Color Craft to produce four-page formats with effortless efficiency. The Prosetter, which features a new Single Cassette Loader for fully automatic plate feeding, delivers improved quality, reliability and speed. Thompson said plate changing now takes only three and a half minutes, compared to the 20 minutes it took previously with manual labor.
“The prepress equipment alone has reduced our material costs by 25%,” Thompson said, “and the all new equipment gives us a shorter footprint, faster makeready, faster stock changes and the flexibility and opportunity to take on new jobs that we would never have been able to with our old equipment.”
Color Craft was formed in the early 1980s and evolved to become a well-known and established business in the Charleston community. Thompson bought the company in 1999 and began concentrating on periodical and booklet making work. Today, Color Craft is a mid-sized commercial printer that handles jobs for a variety of local and statewide industries, including tourism, healthcare, chemicals, coal and the arts.